A Boutique-Designing Biker Dude

By

Ray A. Smith

Updated May 7, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

ENLARGE

Architect Peter Marino at his New York office
Francois Dischinger for The Wall Street Journal

In a spacious "war room" in the midtown Manhattan offices of Peter Marino Architect, dozens of samples of Lancôme lipsticks, moisturizers and perfumes are piled on a table. They won't be used on the faces or bodies of the firm's 160 employees—they're there to help Mr. Marino design the brand's first flagship store in Asia.

"I said to them 'Where's my box of skin care? Where's my box of products? I want all the lipsticks, the perfume, all of it,' " recalled Mr. Marino. "They sent two boxes and I said, 'You're being mingy, I want four.' I'm very product-based as a designer. You can't be divorced from the product."

The go-to architect for some of the world's biggest luxury brand names, Mr. Marino designs stores from soup to nuts, overseeing every detail from color and lighting fixtures to where the handbags should sit. For more than 20 years he's designed or redesigned 30 Chanel stores, 20 stores for Louis Vuitton, eight stores for Dior and eight for Ermenegildo Zegna, as well as boutiques for Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Donna Karan.

ENLARGE

Louis Vuitton, New Bond Street, London, which opened May 2010.
Paul Warchol

The stores are luxurious spectacles, with leather walls, hand-finished curtains and color-changing stairs with treads made of limestone and glass strips. There's often a lot of natural light and pieces of artwork and sculptures commissioned for the store. "If you bother to get somebody to come in your store, you've got to give them 10 reasons why they shouldn't just" click on a website, Mr. Marino said.

Mr. Marino is a bit of a spectacle himself. The beefy 61-year-old wears a standard uniform of all-black leather biker wear, topped off with an officer's cap. An avid motorcycle rider, Mr. Marino adopted the style a little more than 10 years ago after his parents, who weren't crazy about the hobby, passed away. Although he grew up in New York, Mr. Marino speaks with a British accent that occasionally lapses into American teenager slang. He sometimes refers to himself in the third person as Pedro. Mr. Marino is an avid collector of bronze sculptures whose collections were the subject of two exhibitions last year, at the Wallace Collection in London and the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.

As distinctive as his personal style may be, Mr. Marino's reputation has been built on his ability to listen to his clients and channel what they want. Before digging in, Mr. Marino meets with the labels' designers, marketing people, advertising crew and finance staff separately, "so the cart can be pulled in the same way. [Everyone] has to pull in the same direction."

The Dior flagship in Manhattan, which reopened late last year after Mr. Marino's redesign, includes a ceiling relief with a motif of the lily of the valley, Mr. Dior's favorite flower. A 16,000-square-foot store for Louis Vuitton that opened last year on London's New Bond Street reflects how critical bag sales are to the brand's heritage. Customers can sit at the store's "bag bar," where backlit purses revolve in display boxes.

Chanel SoHo Paul Warchol

"He infuses modernity into our boutiques while integrating the codes and symbols associated with Chanel," said Maureen Chiquet, Chanel's global chief executive officer. "He asks a lot of questions about the market and often walks through the space with our key boutique managers and sales associates." Anna Zegna, Zegna's image director, added, "Peter Marino has the extraordinary ability to recognize a company's DNA and values, and apply this to the architectural construction of the store-to-be." The metallic strands on the windows and staircases of Zegna stores are reminiscent of Zegna textiles, she noted.

Mr. Marino likes stores to be tactile, and often custom makes fabrics tailored to the brand. At Zegna, the stucco that decorates the passages between the floors was inspired by the brand's CashCo fabric, a corduroy blend of cashmere and cotton, according to Ms. Zegna.

After graduating with an architecture degree from Cornell University, Mr. Marino worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, George Nelson and I.M. Pei/Cossutta & Ponte before launching his own firm in 1978. His first projects included an apartment for Yves Saint Laurent and a Factory studio for Andy Warhol. In the late 1980s, he was given his first retail project—the redesign of the Barneys New York flagship.

Visualization of the stores typically takes place in the war rooms in Mr. Marino's offices, each containing samples of a fashion house's latest collections for inspiration. In the room for Céline, a minimalist luxury label, hangers held clothing fresh from the label's runway show to help inform the aesthetic of a future boutique in Manhattan. From there he starts deciding "what do I do, what's a good color, what do I feel like, where am I going."

The Details

• Architect Peter Marino tends to start with the feel and touch of the building. "I start with materials well before renderings. It's about what looks good, what creates an ambience. The shapes come later."

• Mr. Marino has been credited with popularizing the use of natural light via big windows in stores. The attitude of stores when he came on to the scene, he said, was "'we don't want customers to realize it's getting late because they'll want to leave.' How about they won't come back because it's so miserable?"

• He adds inspiration from fine artists, getting their interpretation of the brand. For the stores, "I don't like this process of finding a painting and saying, 'That would look lovely with these shoes on the third floor.' I have involvement with the artists from the very beginning." He asks the artists things like "What does Chanel mean to you?" "Sometimes the artists come up with beautiful things, things I wouldn't even think of," he says.

Walls in these rooms are often papered over with collaged clippings of the brands' ads and archival imagery. In the Dior room, an image of a model in a "New Look" cinched waist dress circa the 1950s helped spark the idea for the sharp-angled shape of the store he is designing for the label in Seoul.

When asked how he is able to keep track of each project and give each its own identity, Mr. Marino referred to the private residences for which he's been retained throughout his career.

"Dude, after having done 20 years of private homes and no two clients want the same thing, the brands are really easy. If you think Giorgio Armani wanted his house anything like Valentino's…you see what I'm saying?"

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